The Future of Dine-Out Interface Design from... Pizza Hut?

It's been over a year since we've seen interactive restaurant tables in the news, but here comes a new one from Pizza Hut. Yes, the American fast food joint is hoping that if their deep-dish pizzas aren't enough to get you inside, perhaps their fee-yancy touchscreen table will be. Have a look:

What's interesting about this, from a business perspective, is that Pizza Hut is owned by Yum! Brands, which also owns KFC and Taco Bell. While the last interactive restaurant table we looked at was integrated into a one-off restaurant, Yum! Brands (God I hate typing that stupid exclamation point in their name) has some 40,000 restaurants in over 125 countries.

As for the actual interface design (which was done by creative firm Chaotic Moon), it still seems a bit cutesy to me; I'm not confident that people will want to do a two-finger drag to choose a pie size, for instance—I suspect they'd rather just hit an S, M or L button. But the visual representation of how large something is will probably prove popular. And once the balance between what the technology can do and what people actually want has been worked out, if Y!B decides to move ahead with this concept, we could see mass uptake in a relatively short time period, on account of their size. Presumably they've got the juice to require individual franchisees to integrate these units, handily spreading the costs out.

9 Comments

As a child, one of the first things I associated with our local Pizza Hut was their table-top video game console. While waiting for pizza I'd beg for a quarter and play Centipede sitting down. How apropos that Pizza Hut would deliver a table-top interface for ordering.

Pizza will still need a cleaner to wipe up and clear all of your garbage. This same individual could have just taken your order in the first place. So Pizza Hut really is not gaining much by implementing this system.

And you know it would never look like this if it was ever implemented in actual Pizza Hut locations. Not after their in-house marketing people get their greasy pizza fingers on it and brand it to death.

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